Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us
Excellent video from MediaCultures about the internet. Data is being shared, mixed, remixed, to produce something amazing. I think this is what Tim Berners-Lee meant when he conceived of hypertext.
So Web 3.0 will develop intelligence?
code: “Hello internets, how are you feeling today?”
Jane: “I am feeling just fine, code”
I keep trying to resist the idea that tagging photos of your vacations on Flickr will really produce sentience, but that sort of process, millions of creatures constantly contributing context, might be able to produce data structures capable of supporting intelligence. But how ephemeral an intelligence! Dependant entirely upon the continued generation of electricity by the beings from which it is composed. Of course, individual cells must’ve thought the same thing while they were busy with the first experiments in multi-cellular organisms. So to speak.
Also, I don’t /like/ tagging pictures on Flickr. I dread the day when the Internets Overlord makes this activity compulsory so that it may continue to exist. (I wonder if, say, liver cells ever have a similar experience? One of them starts thinking “oh great, not /more/ alcohol and sleeping pills to filter out of the bloodstream. God damn it, I quit!” Of course, then sometimes they become a cancer and are medicated to death.)
It’s amusing to ponder the part that flat, “dead” data might play in an internet-borne intelligence. I want a tshirt that reads “my blog and wiki support the global consciousness, but my vanity poetry page from 1999 just brings it down”.
{cross-posting to blog and LJ}
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